When comparing Chicken vs Armed Bear Common Lisp, the Slant community recommends Chicken for most people. In the question“What are the best Lisp dialects?” Chicken is ranked 6th while Armed Bear Common Lisp is ranked 19th. The most important reason people chose Chicken is:
The Chicken community is very helpful and friendly.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Friendly, welcoming community
The Chicken community is very helpful and friendly.
Pro Well documented
Chicken has easy to navigate and understand documentation that's updated frequently.
Pro Easy to embed
Likewise, FFI is very simple compared to most Scheme implementations.
Pro Compiles to native code
Pro chicken-doc
It has a tool named chicken-doc. With its help you can easily add autocomplete and documentation features to your favorite editor.
Pro Permissive BSD License
Pro Can be integrated into java programs for scripting capabilities
Pro Fairly simple to learn and use
Written and interoperable with Java.
Cons
Con Lacks numeric tower support
The core system currently does not support the full numeric tower. However, there is an extension library available.
Con Lacks proper UTF-8 support
For more detail see http://bugs.call-cc.org/ticket/1374
It's been up there for 9 months, still not fixed.
Con The java API isn't always enough
Some of its features are made private and can't easily be modified from java.
Con Can be slow and clunky because of the java overhead
It is using java.
Java is slow.
Ergo: abcl is slow.
